Are You Experienced? (6 page)

My dad was incredibly skinny, and looked astonishingly young. My uncle looked almost exactly like an older version of me.

After that picture came an entire page with nothing on it except for three tickets to Woodstock. My heart jumped. There were only a few more pages left in the book, and I was almost afraid to turn them. It felt like I was counting down to the end of my uncle's life.

Actually, there was only one photo left. The rest of the book was blank. That one picture was shocking enough, though. It featured Willow and my father standing slightly off to one side of the frame, while a man whose face I knew handed an electric guitar to Michael.

This was absolutely impossible!

The guitar case was right there on the floor next to me. Half of me was almost laughing at the other half for even thinking what I was thinking. There was just no way. But the night couldn't get much weirder, so I popped the latches on the case and swung open the lid to reveal an electric guitar with a sheet of looseleaf paper threaded through the strings. I stood, unsteadily, and peered at the guitar. It was an off-white Fender Stratocaster with a white pickguard. A right-handed Fender Stratocaster, strung upside down so that it could be played by a lefty. There was a pick tucked in behind the top edge of the pickguard. My knees buckled.

It couldn't be. I had seen a guitar that looked exactly like this one on the covers of several guitar magazines, and in a bunch of books, too. I had watched close-ups of that guitar being played onstage. At Woodstock. By Jimi Hendrix, the greatest rock guitarist who ever lived. My musical idol. I had done a huge biography project on him for school. I had read tons of books and magazine articles about his career, watched video clips of practically every interview he had ever done, and of course, studied his music with a burning intensity. I knew everything about his life—well, except the part where apparently he gave my uncle his most famous instrument. Forget about digging up regular, ordinary buried treasure: this was like finding out I had spent my entire life in a house that held the Holy Grail in its basement.

Except for one problem. This couldn't be Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock guitar. I knew that guitar was supposed to be in a museum in Seattle. The owners only took it out for super-special occasions, because it was worth millions of dollars.

I looked at the paper between the strings. It read,

Hold this for Gabriel. One day, he will come for it. Jimi said he will know what to do. DO NOT LET ANYBODY ELSE PLAY THIS GUITAR!

~
M

My head was spinning. I knelt down between the guitar and the photo album. I read the caption under the photo:

“Jimi Hendrix walks off the stage at Woodstock on Monday, August 18, 1969, and gives this guitar to my brother, Michael Barber.”

I guessed that Michael had written the note, but who in the world was Gabriel? Why was my father, of all people, holding what may very well have been the single most valuable electric guitar on the planet? I turned the note over and saw there was writing on the back, as well, in a different, spidery hand:

Gabriel, play my chord for an electric three-day pass.

~ JMH

What was an “electric three-day pass”? A three-day pass to what? And what was “my chord”? Had Jimi Hendrix written that? I knew his middle name was Marshall, so the initials were right. And if it had been written by Jimi, I had an idea what chord he might have meant. There's this one special chord that guitarists call “The Hendrix Chord.” It's called an “E-seven-sharp-nine” chord. He used it in his most famous song, “Purple Haze,” and in another one called “Foxy Lady.” That had to be what he was talking about.

This is where I really went off the deep end. But honestly, once you've already gotten your dad beaten up and arrested, plus he's refused your apology, and when your parents have never let you do anything even before that, how much more trouble can you possibly get in? What were they going to do—revoke my internal organs? Ground me from oxygen?

Very carefully, I took the guitar out of the case, grabbed the pick, and started tuning. The strings were way, way out of whack after the instrument had sat in its case in a basement all this time. When everything sounded right in standard tuning, I played the chord, but it didn't sound quite like the way it did when Jim Hendrix played “Purple Haze.” That was when it hit me: Jimi hadn't tuned his guitar the standard way. He had always tuned all six of his strings down a half-step, so that every chord he played came out a half-step flat.

Quickly, I tuned each string down a half-step. My hands were sweating, and a little shaky. I couldn't believe I was really playing Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock Strat! I hit the chord again, and now that the guitar was in Jimi's real tuning, I could swear I felt some kind of magic
zing!
emanating through the strings and into my body. It wasn't like any feeling I had ever felt before, but it was amazing. It was almost as though I were onstage at Woodstock. I could only imagine how amazing the guitar would sound through an amplifier.

An amplifier! Mom had said Dad had one down here. With extreme caution—if all of this was true, I was wearing a two-million-dollar guitar on a forty-five-year-old strap—I walked over to the open door of my father's formerly always-locked closet. Sure enough, there was a gigantic amp in there. It was a Marshall half-stack, just like the ones Jimi Hendrix had famously used. A piece of faded, peeling masking tape on the front top edge read PROPERTY OF MICHAEL BARBER. An instrument cable was sitting on top of the amplifier, just waiting to be used. There was an outlet next to the amp, and I could see that the cord was even plugged in.

A chill ran through me. Had my father left this setup here for forty-five years, just so it would be ready for this mysterious Gabriel? If so, where was he? Why hadn't he ever shown up? Had he somehow died like Michael?

I didn't want to think these creepy thoughts anymore, alone in a basement at 4:30 a.m. with a dead man's guitar around my neck. I knew my parents usually woke up at around 5:30, so I didn't have such a huge amount of time left to put all this stuff back in order and sneak upstairs. Still, it seemed like it wouldn't hurt to just plug the guitar into the amp, turn on the power, and pretend for a minute, as long as I didn't actually play.

So, of course, my father chose that one day of his life to wake up an hour early and barge in just as I was hitting my best Hendrix pose.

“NOOOOO!!!!!!” he screamed. He didn't even sound furious. Truthfully, at first, he sounded more scared than anything else. “Richard, you don't understand what you're doing!”

“Dad, I'm holding a guitar and pretending to play an E-seven-sharp-nine chord.”

“Richie, please. Listen to me. I know I was harsh before, all right? Let's just put down the guitar, and we can talk.”

I thought,
Oh, now you want to talk? Sure, now that I found your top-secret priceless Jimi Hendrix guitar and massive amp in a freaking hidden basement bunker!

“Dad, I wanted to talk last night, when I tried to apologize and you slammed the door in my face. But now…”

Dad looked kind of green and sick. “Now?” he asked.

“Now I just want to play!” I reached behind me and cranked the volume knob on the amplifier as high as it would go. Then I placed the fingers of my right hand ever so carefully in the correct positions on the fretboard of the guitar, smiled at my father, and played Jimi Hendrix's chord.

I felt electricity run up my arms and spread through my entire body, but somehow it wasn't burning me. It was filling me up. The chord got louder and louder, and the sensations got stronger and stronger. Then, when I felt I would explode, everything went white.

The next thing I knew, I was lying naked in a ditch.

 

I'M A STRANGER HERE

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969

 

Woodstock. I was in the middle of freaking Woodstock. Have you ever visited a movie set, like in Hollywood, or at Universal Studios Florida or something? Once on a school trip to New York City, I ended up with my class in the middle of the shooting for a Nike sneaker commercial in Times Square. This was like that feeling—
I'm in a movie
—but magnified a million times. I was in a movie as it was being filmed, and I was the only person out of the half million in attendance who knew the ending.

Crazy.

We found a space big enough to spread out two blankets a few hundred yards uphill from the stage. Michael said the volume of the music would be perfect there because we were right near the platform with the sound mixing board. For a guy with the problems I knew he had—for a guy who had hit me with a car that morning—he seemed to me like a born leader. I could see why Willow and my dad both looked at him like he was some kind of hero.

If he was the travel and seat master, though, there was no doubt that Willow was the food boss. The instant we sat down, she took over lunch duty. She was all like, “Your parents aren't here, so I'm going to be your road mom for the weekend.” It was kind of sexist, but I was really tired and hungry, so if somebody wanted to take charge and put together a meal right at that moment, I was all for it.

Willow spread out everything we had bought at the store, along with a bunch of fresher food she must have already been carrying, like cheeses, bakery bread, cold cuts, fancy cookies, and fruit. She even had a little glass jar of mayo, plus a knife for spreading it. I hadn't eaten anything since lunch—and it was impossible to calculate how long ago that had been. Along with the shakiness I'd already been feeling, now I was practically drooling. I nearly reached out and yanked a roll right out of Willow's lap.

Michael raised an eyebrow. “Fresh bread? Bakery cookies? Fruit? Wow. Where'd this come from?”

Willow giggled. “Let's just say I don't think I can go back to work at the cafe when we go home to Pennsylvania.”

Dad looked horrified. I felt half-horrified, but also half-starved and half-in-love. Wait, I guess that should be a third for each of those. Anyway, Willow was a sexy, badass food thief. “I love you, Willow,” Michael said. That made at least two of us.

“I know,” she said. Then she handed each of us an open roll and started piling on the meats and cheeses. When we finished eating most of the fresh stuff, Willow packed everything else up for later, and we all lay back on the blankets. Michael asked me if I wanted to go and find a first-aid tent or something, but there was no way I could do that. I had been thinking about it: They would ask me my name, which I couldn't give them. They would want to call my parents, and I'd have to say, “Well, my mom lives in New Jersey. The call might freak her out, though, because she's four years younger than I am right now.” And if they decided I needed to go to a hospital or something, I'd get separated from my dad and my uncle.

I told Michael I just needed some sleep, and closed my eyes. My mind was going a mile a minute. I started wondering why my father had never recognized me as Gabriel while I was growing up. Was it the white-blond hair? I looked completely different with it, so a few decades later, when I came along, with jet-black hair, it seemed logical that he wouldn't have made the connection. Then I thought about what would happen if and when I found a way to get back to the future after my “electric three-day pass.” Would my dad recognize me as Gabriel at that point? How would he react? Would the shock drive him insane? Would he keel over with a heart attack?

I realized I was getting way ahead of myself. For now, I had to stick with my father and my uncle. I didn't know what to do, or exactly how or why I had ended up here—it's not often you find out there's a guitar in your basement that's secretly Jimi Hendrix's most famous instrument and also, apparently, a time machine. But I figured there had to be a purpose. Jimi Hendrix had left that note for Gabriel, and then Michael's last wish on earth had been for Gabriel to end up with the guitar. Michael's writing floated in front of my closed eyelids:

Hold this for Gabriel. One day, he will come for it. Jimi said he will know what to do
.

A thrill shot through me as I realized something: By Monday morning, Jimi Hendrix would know us well enough that he would give Michael his Stratocaster, and trust me with some sort of guitar-related future mission. So there was part one of my job: meet Jimi Hendrix. I opened my eyes for a moment and scanned the throngs of people pouring in from every direction. I looked downhill at the stage, and noticed the high wooden fences surrounding it. I thought about the fact that Jimi Hendrix was already a legendary rock star, the closing act at the biggest concert the world had ever seen, and I was a fifteen-year-old who technically didn't even exist yet.
Sure,
I thought.
I don't see any possible obstacles to getting this done
.

Then again,
I told myself, I
will do this. I know I will, because I'm pretty sure I already have
. This was really confusing. But okay, assuming I was going to meet Hendrix, what was I supposed to say or do? Here was the thing: Jimi was going to die of a drug overdose, just like Michael, only his was going to come in about a year, in 1970. Was I supposed to warn Jimi about his own death? No, that couldn't be, because how would the Jimi I was going to meet in 1969 know I had to warn him that he would die in 1970? Plus, what rock star would believe a fifteen-year-old kid who ran up to him and said, “Hey, a year from now, in London, don't wash down a bunch of sleeping pills with a bottle of red wine!”

I propped myself up on my elbows and snuck a peek at Michael and Willow, who were lying on the blanket to my right. She had taken off her fringed vest and pushed her T-shirt up so that her stomach was exposed to the sun, while he had taken his shirt off. They were basking in the sun with their arms around each other, kissing and whispering as though they were alone in a dark room. I wondered how he could possibly go from being this in love to killing himself with drugs in just nine weeks.